Bedrock Acquires Procoto to Revolutionize Procurement Processes and Enhance Enterprise Supplier Management Capabilities.
We’ve found that within most finance teams, prevention has become AP’s clear focus. Automation platforms promise fewer errors and AI tools claim to detect issues before payments are issued, while internal controls are tightened, workflows are refined, and dashboards are monitored.
While this is an important, and vital piece of the puzzle, it’s only half of it.
AP teams with the highest success understand that prevention without recovery lacks evidence, and recovery without prevention lacks durability. When paired together, prevention and recovery create a continuous cycle of improvement that protects cash, strengthens controls, and reduces future risk.
Preventive controls are designed, most simply, to stop errors before they occur. We see this in common functions like invoice matching, approval hierarchies, tolerance thresholds, vendor validation rules, and AIbased features like anomaly detection.
Even if “performing well”, these systems depend on assumptions that typically go unchallenged. Here are some examples:
The reality is that AP environments are complex. Variability is introduced through things like mergers, ERP changes, staffing turnover, and decentralized purchasing. Even with the nest prevention framework, you can’t account for every single case.
Traditionally, AP recovery audits are treated as transactional exercises where the focus is on identifying overpayments, recovering funds, and then moving on until it’s time to do it all again. We believe that this is a huge underestimation of their strategic value.
Bedrock’s recovery audits uncover patterns that prevention systems miss, like:
Each of these findings is a diagnostic signal that provides solid evidence of where controls are failing, where data is breaking down, and where risk is most highly concentrated.
We have found that one of the biggest gaps in AP strategy is what happens after the recovery audit.
In many organizations, the insights gathered in the audit don’t make it back into operational changes. A high performing AP team, however, would treat those findings as inputs (not outputs).
Recovery data can be used to:
If followed, this process creates a feedback loop where recovery informs prevention and prevention becomes smarter over time.
Framing recovery and prevention as an either/or decision creates a false tradeoff. Recovery looks backward by identifying losses that have already occurred, while prevention looks forward by attempting to stop future losses. Together, they form a complete risk management strategy.
When recovery audits are conducted regularly and their insights are operationalized, organizations begin to move from reactive cleanup to proactive optimization. Once an organization has made it there, errors are less repetitive, and prevention frameworks evolve based on hard evidence.
At Bedrock, we believe that AP recovery is not a one time event, and prevention is not a standalone solution.
By combining advanced technology with experienced recovery specialists, we help organizations:
This integrated approach allows AP teams to move beyond the surface level fixes, based on the outputs, and build durable financial processes, based on the inputs.
Ready to stop choosing between prevention and recovery? Let’s build a strategy that does both. Book a call with Bedrock today.